These are fantastic.
I'll comment on the "not sure if this worked" Simply put, not like it is. The layers are not complete and too much missing when you were trying to layer/mask/brush everything back in. Unfortunately, it's not clean at all. But, just take the second photo out of each one of them and you might have a winner with no brushing required. It could work and it would look much more symmetrical. The way it is now, the second pictures are too close to the final of them together, not enough spacing. That's just my $.02.

Don't let that take anything away from my original comment that the rest of these are great!! Lighting is mint.